A Bit Rich

Many of Labour's most equitable achievements were hardly publicised. The massive home improvement overseen by John (now Lord) Prescott passed without barely any acknowledgement. The same could be said for the Supporting People Budget administered by the National Housing Federation.

The million or so people the fund helped to be housed are pretty close to the most vulnerable in society - the homeless, those recovering from mental illness, those who have escaped from trafficking gangs and severe domestic violence. Ths is the kind of work a compassionate Government carries out quietly and its returns are only measured in knowing they did the right thing in protecting the weak and oppressed.

Coalition plans to lump 40 percent off the NHF budget are no surprise. These Ministers have quickly got out the habit of making any judgement on the human worth of current spending projects - their determination is to continue reducing the deficit without regard to the social and economic catastrophe which will ensue.

When it comes to identifying these areas of wasteful spending, who better then Billionaire retailer Philip Green to tell Ministers where to wield the axe? Green certainly can be relied on to dispense with sentimental affectation.

Cameron's decision to use Green as a kind of Whitehall troubleshooter is just the worst idea for achieving what they laughably call "fair and equitable savings". Green cannot have the first idea of the value of social services to the poor and elderly. He would hardly be likely to casually pick up that knowledge in between massive takeovers of retail firms.

One hopes it is a gimmick but I am sure he will be allowed at some point to express his judgement on the undeserving poor. The only hope is the counter culture to commercial success aka the Civil Service, frustrates him at his every turn.

Resistance is Low

I suppose you can't exactly blame David Cameron for pressing on with such boldness on his plans to slash frontline public services. He has faced such little vocal opposition, he may yet have convinced himself there is something of a consensus for the imminent steep rise on the country's levels of poverty and joblessness.

By his recent suggestion, Council houses should be leased, implies he views social housing as one stage of a family's property needs before they go onto own more substantial dwellings; here he confuses the safety net for the trampoline.

The Tory Government has fallen into the ideological trap of considering the economy of the nation as no diferent in principle from that of a household. Cameron said just yesterday, "We cannot live beyond our means," as if the lower income groups had been recklessly extravagant in recent years. But when he spills out this drivel, there is barely a murmur from the opposition and media in reminding us the huge debt derives from the six elephants in the room: the bailed out banks which cost us the taxpayer about £100Bn to support their profligacy.

Of the five Labour leadership candidates, it pains me to say, only Ed Balls has barked back at any discernable volume. On the considerable risk this sixth-form economics experiment will tip the country back into recession, Balls said, "Cameron is ...wrong to say the most urgent priority for Britain is to slash the deficit..[it] should be to secure Britain's economic recovery by boosting jobs and growth."

And yet it falls to the oldest radical of all, Tony Benn (above) to organise the "resistance". His article in the guardian today (www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/Aug/04/time-to-organise-resistance-now) sets out in cold anger what those who oppose the Tories should be doing. His new group already has substantial intellectual support, now its aims need to be considered by the wider public as mainstream view. After all it's only our future.

Opposites Attract

In 1812, Governor Gerry of Massachusetts (left) carved up the constituencies of the State in a shameless attempt to rig his re-election. The term 'Gerrymander' derives from the fact one seat was drawn so unwieldy, it somewhat resembled a salamander.


History lesson complete, the final row of this Parliament on the final day before recess concerned the proposed referendum on moving to the AV system for elections or a "pathetic excuse for a voting system" as Clegg used to call it.

Although Labour was the only party to include a committment for AV in its manifesto, it has no option but to oppose the bill as it has all sorts of Tory electoral fixes bolted on to it. The drive to equalise the constituencies, although worthy in principle, will have to defy existing county boundaries and make some rural one bigger than whole counties, making life effectively impossible for the sitting MP.

As Comrade Straw alluded to at DPMQs, it will mean making a hybrid constituency, half made of some of the Isle of Wight and the remainder a chunk of Hampshire. The Cabinet Office drone, Mark Harper, answered that point rather dimly, "we are not proposing to move anybody who currently lives on the IoW". Neither are they proposing to allow them to have their say as that pesky local consultation thing would inevitably delay the process.

Clegg has still not explained why it is neccessary to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600 although one suspects it is part of the math in stitching up the constituncies. The saving of £12m is not remotely proportionate to the loss of democratic representation. MPs are already overwhelmed by constituency inquiries and now they will volunteer to add ten percent to that workload.

The Cons also are living under a strange dichotomy, they will fight to the death to allow the Lib-Dems their little referendum to take place then at the actual vote, oppose it.

The Bill should still pass, the referendum will probably be delayed past the proposed 5 May but will be almost certainly lost. It's a classic three card trick from the Tories. The defeat of electoral reform will be a sad indictment of how politically inept the Lib-Dems are proving in Government.

Vandals at the Gate

Thatcherism, as a brand of economic and political philosophy. was borne out of a fundamental re-appraisal of policy by senior Tories following their two electoral defeats in 1974.

The main architects were Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell who fundamentally rejected Keynes in favour of a Monetarist approach. It proved to be a highly divisive and transformative force for change in UK. But at least, you could say it was intellectually coherent.

The current Coalition Government appear to be acting with no such higher strategy other than tearing down any constructive organisation established under Labour by labelling them "wasteful" or "bureaucratic". Each day seems to bring another crass decision of incredible ineptitude. In many cases the organisations to be abolished are, by any measure, revenue-raising for HM Treasury and not remotely a burden on public finances.

The decision by that gormless, grinning buffoon Jeremy Hunt to scrap the National Film Council defies any sense whatever. Established in 2000, the Council has invested lottery money in about 900 films and has repaid its original money at about a ratio of 5:1. The Chief Executive, John Woodward, was not even consulted to present his case for defence to these Ministers.

The Sustainable Development Commission is a smaller operation with a budget of only £3m but has shown to be highly effective in identifying huge areas of savings in fuel, water and waste particularly by Government. Again scrapped, without evaluation, by the stroke of a pen. By these standards, the intended investment in sporting prowess for the London 2012 Olympics looks extremely vulnerable. Presumably the message which needs to be sent out to athletes is that Gold medals are only truely earned if by an entirely free-market approach.

Certainly this Government is acting swifter and more ruthlessly than Thatcher's first Government of 1979-83. But its manner is haphazard, capricious and at times just plain self-defeating.

History and politics can always surprise us but by their unneccesary perniciousness this Government now makes the Iron Lady, Thatcher's look quite amenable and sympathetic.

War on Safety

If you believed every word of our cynical press, you would never consider Britain to be top of any world league at all. But the almost total uncelebrated fact is Britain's roads are the safest in the world, beating notoriously cautious and sensible nations like Germany, Sweden and Japan.

The remarkable achievement is owing to the successful introduction of technology, enforcement and advertising over a sustained period. Although every new measure, like the breathalyser has been fought fiercely by a small vocal army of reactionaries, successive Governments have resisted their unscientific claims and spurious appeals to a personal right to liberty.

Until now. Step forward the Coalition Government's prize fool, 'Road Safety' Minister, Mike Penning. His mindless boasting of the new Government's intention to be rid of most of the country's speed cameras will start to reverse 45 years of steady reduction in road deaths, from about 8,000 in 1967 to less than 3,000 last year.

Said Penning, "This is another example of this Government delivering on its pledge to end the war on the motorist." Or, to put it another way, this is another policy entirely based on plainly disprovable nonsense derived from Daily Mail editorials.

A third of road deaths are caused by excessive speed and speed cameras save lives by the most efficient means. There is no study which can disprove that. Leaving aside the human cost of a road death, each one costs the country's emergency services and NHS about £1m, so cutting £50m from road safety budgets will prove to be actually more expensive if the numbers of dead motorists, cyclists and pedestrians grow by just a four or five dozen.

As previous Home Secretary Alan Johnson put it, the Tories have adopted "a saloon bar view." I wonder what hope there remains for plans to lower the drink-drive level in line with the EU average. Looking pretty bleak, I fear.

Other comparably developed countries look jealously at the huge savings Britain makes through road safety where Italy has double the proportion of road deaths and the US treble. Only the most short-sighted, small minded Government would contemplate conceding effortlessly to the road hog lobby. These Ministers do not appear to be fully in control of the vehicle.

Got him.

Shadow Justice Secretary, Jack Straw did pretty as a stand-in for the opposition at PMQs on Wednesday. He focussed much of his questions on the idiotic decision by school bully Osbourne to pull a vital loan for Sheffield Forgemasters, one of only two companies in the world to produce specialist equipment for nuclear power stations.

Besides being a symptomatic example of 80s style false economy from the Tories, the company is located in Clegg's constituency so was also exposing him to acute political embarrassment. The South Yorkshire press are really after him and with good reason.

But Clegg as DPM did quite well too. I mean 'well' in the sense he dodged every question and batted back the same old guff about Liam Byrne's joke note about no money being left. At the final exchange, little Nicky forgot where he was for a moment and felt emboldened to kick out at Straw's role as Foreign Sec in the Iraq invasion. "Perhaps one day he will account for his role in the most disastrous decision of all: the illegal invasion of Iraq."

Illegal, you say. Neither the current Foreign Secretary nor Defence Secretary has suggested as such, let alone Dave. No.10 press office found this quite a tough one to square with spin and suggested when the DPM speaks on such matters it is his "long-held" and "personal" view. Sir George Young, Speaker of the House continued this drivel when told the House, "It is not unprecedented for Ministers speaking at this dispatch box...to make their personal views known."

Claptrap, said the increasingly busy Speaker Bercow. It seems astonishing senior Parliamentary figures need to be reminded of the basics of House convention. At the Dispatch box, you speak as a Minister of the Government and represent Government views alone.

Now it would seem the wooliness of the Coalition on Parliament is the least of their problems. One of Forgemasters main rivals, businessman Andrew Cook, had lobbied for the loan to be withdrawn. It would seem it would have prevented Cook from "investing" in Forgemasters which sounds rather like a takeover bid. His other role as one of the Tory party's main donors introduces this bunch of amateurs to a new yet familiar charge: sleaze.

Rules of Engagement

Every new Government has the right to challenge the accepted procedures and institute new rules to help maintain a fairly efficient Parliamentary democracy. So long as Ministers are even-handed in their decision-making and chairs of Select Committees like, Tim Yeo (left) keep their independence.

But the new Coalition Government, in their haste, seem able to rid themselves of even these tiresome burdens of accountability.

This week Yeo published a dismal pamphlet 'Green Gold' on climate change. His suggestion all motorways should be privatised and all road users compelled to pay for their use was on the radical side. But his 'report' is the kind of material his committee is supposed to assess, he appears to be lobbying himself on this one.

Any body with evidence presented to counter his free-market ideas already knows how this previously unbiased committee will now respond. (It was also staggering to see the matter-of-fact way the Mail reported Yeo's brainchild -when the most modest regulations were brought in under Labour, mostly for the sake of road safety were deemed a 'war on the motorist'.)

IDS, as Sec of State for DWP, is delighting in his ability to judge and condemn whole strata of society which displease him for their apparent fecklessness. At the same time his Centre for Social Justice keeps churning out reports on social issues including, this week, on the management of drug dependence.

Drunken Smith (teetotal) did not pass comment when the CSJ advocated abolition of the pragmatic National Treatment Agency to be replaced by a more ideological Addiction Recovery Board. A few days later the NTA had performed a Damascene-like conversion to setting time limits for allocating methadone to heroin addicts. His meddling in DH and HO business would usually prompt a call from Chief Whip to keep to the brief but IDS seems free to pour his evangelical scorn on the drug user with impunity.

This blurring of roles may not be very good for Government but if he gets his way it may prove, perversely, quite lucrative for dealers in heroin.